Clarksburg, WV (October 18th):Graffiti of War is now pleased to announce to their fans and the public that Maxim Magazine/Alpha Media Group officially has come on board as a major sponsor of the premiere show for the National Art Exposition. Maxim will be joining GoW’s other key sponsors, to include M&T Bank, No Limits Graphix, Purpose1, Schaeffer’s Harley-Davidson, Kelly Line, Inc., and Partridge Bed & Breakfast.

The headline in our local newspaper article recently read: "Eighteen veterans kill themselves every day." When my son was born in 1946, a few months after my medical discharge from the army, I wrote my obituary and contemplated suicide. The thought of a son having to go through sometime in the future, what I have just experienced in the past, compounded my desire to leave this experience Now!

This happened to this WW II veteran sixty five years ago ... BUT, It took me fifty years to transcend the mental miasma of a combat soldiers "hell of war." What the Army's military panel & psychiatrists’ today do not acknowledge is that in: WW II, Shell shock, Battle fatigue, and today's Post Traumatic Stress actually mean: You are mentally, unknowingly, struggling with your post war killing, the death, and the dying around you, not only of your buddy soldiers, but enemy soldiers and innocent women and children and animals by the numbers.

What is not realized is: When a soldier’s uniform comes off and the civilian clothes go back on … The mind of a civilian or soldier is a living camera always taking pictures and storing the negatives in the brain stem, but you don't develop them. You don't hang them out to dry. You never make sense of them, if there's any sense to be made. A combat soldier is a silent pretend guy until the right sound, or sign, that triggers the base of your brain and something goes berserk that develops the negatives and you go berserk.

As a multi-decorated veteran of WW II, who served our country four plus years, in which I participated in five major combat campaigns, my salvation was to transcend the mental miasma of the hell of war by writing. I became an author of 5 books. I never wrote about my war experience in the first 4 books, until I read about veterans committing suicide on a daily basis.

I shot a sniper on D-Day, took his camera and his personal diary from his body, something I had never done in North Africa or Sicily. I used his diary to continue my war experience from June 6, 1944 to Sept. 27th, 1944, when I was severely wounded protecting the re-capture of a German Pillbox on the Siegfried Line, outside of Aachen, Germany.

In WW II, PTSD was unrecognized and untreated. In my book, Warrior to Spiritual Warrior: The Soldier's Journey, there's a famous story from Sicily in July 1943. General George Patton slapped a hospitalized soldier from my outfit, because the soldier couldn't get out of bed. The General took a look at him, didn't see any physical wounds, no blood, no bandages, no arms or legs missing, so he wrote him off as a coward. "We can't have cowards in our army," Said the General. Stress, shock, battle fatigue, those things were unpatriotic, unmanly, unacceptable. General Eisenhower later ordered Patton to apologize or be demoted.
Website: warriortospiritualwarrior.com -